Thanks, Steve

I love my job. I love writing apps for the best mobile operating system on the planet.

I have the privilege of doing what I love thanks to Steve Jobs. I write iOS apps for devices he invented. I do this on a MacBook Pro that he invented. I talk with clients on the iPhone he invented. And I really enjoy it.

Thanks, Steve, for making my job fun.

Mac App Store & Xcode

I'm really glad Apple put Xcode in the Mac App Store. I like getting delta updates for such a huge app.

I'd like it even more if Apple created a place in the Mac App Store for registered iOS developers where we could get delta updates for betas from the App Store as soon as they're released, rather than downloading another 2GB installer. The App Store has all the information it needs - you sign in with your Apple ID, which is what identifies you as a developer. Aside from being more convenient for developers, this would take some of the load off Apple's servers, too, right?

And while we're on the subject of being a developer - I'd like to be able to search iTunes any time for developer-only content, like the WWDC videos. Same applies here - I'm already signed in to iTunes with my Apple ID which is also my developer account, so they know I'm a developer. So why can't I just search for developer content?

Someday, maybe. Someday.

Core Data - Getting more from your errors

Great answer on Stack Overflow about getting more information from your Core Data errors.

Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit

Thanks to Wincent for describing how to get git to display this message. Basically it boils down to this:


git config branch.master.remote origin
git config branch.master.merge refs/heads/master



Of course, if you're working on a different branch, just use your branch name instead of master in all three places above.

iFonts 1.4 has fonts in the email

The latest update to iFonts (your favorite iOS fonts app, I hope :)) now sends an email with the actual fonts instead of sending the entire list in Helvetica. The reason this wasn't included in previous versions was that it didn't look all that great in Gmail in the browser and I couldn't figure out how to make it look good. Now it still doesn't look great in Gmail in your browser, so if you want to see the actual fonts, open the email in Mail on your Mac or iOS device. It looks great in both of those. :) Oh, and it looks good in Sparrow, too.

7 Mac Apps I Love

1Password
keeps all my passwords in one secure place, so I no longer have to (a) remember passwords or (b) reuse passwords (which is a terribly bad idea). Its browser plugins are excellent and make it fast & easy to login to websites.

Backblaze
securely backs up my Mac online. It runs in the background so I never notice it. It's reassuring to me to have everything backed up online in addition to my Time Capsule.

Sparrow
has an archive button! This means no more dragging Gmail messages around in Mail. The threaded conversations are great, too.

Alfred
launches every app I use on my Mac. It's by far my favorite app launcher - it has a great UI and it's much faster than Spotlight. I also use it to find files & folders when I can't remember where I put them...

Notational Velocity
is where I take notes on my Mac. It syncs with Simplenote, so I can also view and edit the notes on my iPad and iPhone.

Dropbox
syncs my 1Password passwords between my Mac, iPhone, iPad. I also use it for sharing files between team members - images, audio files, and a host of other things. It's great to be able to drop a file into a folder on my Mac and have it automatically show up on my teammate's computer.

ClipMenu
stores everything I've copied to my clipboard (well, the last 200 items or so). If you don't have a clipboard history app, you need one. I like that with ClipMenu I can type a few letters to quickly jump to a text clip to re-copy the item.

What Mac apps do you love?

Why Kiwi for iOS testing

I just decided on Kiwi for a project rather than OCMock + OCUnit. These are Kiwi's selling points for me:

1. Stubbing class methods is simpler. With OCMock, I needed to create a special class (one per project - similar to this) to do method swizzling. No such problem with Kiwi - just [MyClass stub:@selector(doFoo) andReturn:myBar];
2. Mock failures with Kiwi show up on the line that failed in Xcode (they showed up in strange places with OCMock).
3. Kiwi's test failures produce descriptive, unambiguous error messages (as opposed to the not-so-helpful messages from OCMock & OCUnit).
4. Syntax. should, equal, stub, mock, and more (rather than STAssertEqualObjects and other not-so-easy-to-read macros & methods). Check out the first code sample on the Setup page to decide for yourself.
5. No need to [mock verify].

Update: The latest version of Kiwi does support debugging in blocks, so the Blocks Alternative is no longer necessary for debugging. I've removed the outdated information from this post.